Out of the Black - Lee Doty [15]
Of course, the last thing she wanted to do right now was to have another strange experience. Fear reasserted itself and she pressed up from the ground. She tried to run before her legs were fully beneath her and fell painfully again; her hands, elbows, belly, then face plowing to the pavement like a foundering dirigible. Oh the humanity, she thought hazily as she mostly choked the scream of pain, which came out as a thin, pathetic sound. The rain fell on her back and splashed off the street around her as she raised herself to hands and knees and began a frantic crawl.
After another two meters of desperate hand and knee damage, she pulled her knees up under her and made a successful lurch to her feet. She stumbled forward, swinging her arms stiffly to counterbalance her shifting weight. She risked a glance behind her and saw him lying there still, dead as ever- well, more dead than before- really dead? He looked small, helpless and horribly broken, but he'd looked like that before.
She realized that she was still making the plaintive "ohhohhh" sound that she'd started the second time she fell. She didn't try to stop it. Instead she ran, embracing its shallow comfort, letting it elongate into sobs which too soon turn into wracking gasps of physical and emotional overexertion. She had to stop. She rumbled to a halt at the near side of an intersection. Panting, she leaned against the rough stone of a building, trying to regain her breath. When she closed her eyes, his face filled her vision and waves of vertigo crashed around. Her eyes jerked open- she'd almost gone out again. Around her, phantoms of her fear filled the night air, skulking in the shadows, lingering at the edges of the light's influence.
She glanced back to the fallen man to gauge her progress: she'd gone a block.
One stinking block? She felt like she was going to have some kind of exercise-related rupture and she had only run one block; so much for her track and field aspirations. The occasional bark of hysterical laughter mixed with her panting and sobbing.
Behind her, not far from the crumpled car and the crumpled man, a door opened. Light flooded out into the street and a dark shadow fell across the sidewalk. She cut her lip on a piece of glass embedded in her palm as she pressed it over her mouth to squelch her desperate sounds. She stumbled around the corner and peered cautiously back as a well-dressed man staggered out the door.
He looked normal enough, no horns or tail or flaming eyes. His clothes made Anne think of an investment banker or some other near-north-side success story. He was maybe fifty and bald with a close-cropped fringe of metallic gray hair. He carried an umbrella in his right hand, which he deployed as he stepped from the shelter of the building. His left hand was held against his body as if he'd hurt the arm in a recent fall.
He scanned the street, looking for something- maybe he had heard the commotion outside and came to investigate. Maybe he was looking for witnesses- maybe he was looking for her. Time to go. She withdrew behind the corner and made her best speed away. She didn't see the man approach the crumpled car. She didn't see the umbrella fall to the street as the man fell to his knees beside the corpse, heedless of the rain and broken glass.
As she approached the next intersection, she looked back, terrified of pursuit. She wasn't sure, but she thought she saw a flicker of light, like a softer and more localized cousin of lightening. It came from around the corner where she had been standing. It was subtle, and on any other day she might have been able to convince herself that it was her imagination.
On any other day she wouldn't